i don’t think people understand the overwhelming difficulty of becoming a refugee:
1. you give away everything. your past life is gone. you sell it all to pay for your paperwork.
2. sometimes you have to travel, sometimes a thousand miles, to find a checkpoint to register as a refugee. the journey is not easy, sometimes it is over water, sometimes at the hands of a smuggler who does not care if you or your children die. sometimes they do. sometimes your family is gone before you reach the checkpoint.
3. the wait. you wait years, sometimes just 2 if you’re lucky, sometimes 6 if you’re not. you spend this wait in camps, in buildings that are unsafe, your children have nothing and you can’t do anything about it. there’s no room for success. you sit in despair for what seems like forever.
and then to finally be taunted with a sliver of hope–a possible home–and then to be denied at the gates of American airports, i don’t know if there is anything worse. It is not beneath the U.S. to do this. They have turned away Jewish refugees at their borders, sent them back to face their death. History is possibly repeated today.
